Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Salim asked me why I didn’t use a shampoo to dye my hair. He said he had a wonderful French shampoo. “Would you like to try it?”

“No, thank you.”

“I use it, look at my hair.”

“You?”

“Certainly. I’ve been using it for eighteen years.”

“You!”

He said the shampoo had removed all traces of white from his hair. He then told me his story.

Now that’s a story, I said to myself. No one had agreed to describe his experience of the massacre to the French people, so I asked if he’d let me translate this into English.

Salim said he could speak English if he wanted to and didn’t need me to translate, but he didn’t want to tell them his story.

When Salim said his hair had turned white, Abu Akram shrugged his shoulders as though he already knew and looked at me in amazement, as though I should have known, too.

I asked him apologetically how his hair had come to be white, and he smoothed it with his right hand and said it had turned white during the massacre.

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Five,” he said. He said his mother had picked him up; they had both been bleeding, and his mother had run through the fire.

“There wasn’t a fire,” I said.

“Oh yes there was,” he said. “The fire was everywhere, and we jumped over it.”

“It was the flares,” said Abu Akram.

“No,” said Salim.

“Of course,” said the fat man. “What’s the problem? Everyone tells the story his own way. There wasn’t any fire, Son, it was the flares, but you were young, how would you know.”

“I know alright,” said Salim and pointed at his head.

He said his mother ran with him, picked him up and ran, and they were shooting in all directions. He’d clung to her neck, then suddenly, everything went sticky and bloody, and he’d come to in the hospital with his hair as white as snow. The nurses had been afraid of him.

“In America I shaved my head.”

He said he’d gone to America with his mother after all the members of his family had been killed. “My mother emigrated to join her sister in Detroit and took me with her. That was in ’84, but they refused to give me a resident’s visa. I stayed with her for two years in secret, then I came back. She told me, ‘You go back to Lebanon and I’ll send for you when they give me a Green Card.’”

“And did she send for you?”

“No. I waited and waited but it was no use. Abu Akram is my father’s first cousin. He took me in and is letting me live in this office until my mother sends for me. I wrote her letters, but I received no responses. It seems the Americans don’t like white hair, or she’s forgotten about me. God knows where she is now. I asked to meet the American ambassador in Beirut. I phoned the embassy several times, but they never gave me an appointment, I don’t know why, even though I spoke Classical English to them.”

“There’s no such thing as Classical English,” I said.

“What are you talking about, man? All the languages are the same. There’s colloquial Arabic and Classical Arabic and there’s colloquial English and Classical English, am I right?”

“No,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter.”

“Do you want some shampoo?”

He got up and fetched a black leather case, opened it, and took out a number of bottles.

“I sell shampoo to keep myself busy.”

He went over to the actress and indicated that she should buy some. Catherine took a bottle and seemed embarrassed, not knowing what she should do.

I snatched the bottle from her and gave it back to Salim.

“Forget it. Try it on someone else.”

“Let them make up their own minds, brother. Maybe they would have bought some.”

“Leave it alone, Son. Forget it,” I scolded him in a loud voice.

“Why don’t you buy some, Doctor, and dye your hair,” said Salim.

“What’s he saying,” asked the tall man.

“He’s selling dye,” I answered, and quickly told him the story of Salim’s white hair.

“Don’t tell him,” said Salim. “If you want, I’ll tell him myself. But did you believe my story? I only tell it to sell shampoo.”

I looked at Abu Akram and saw his lips curling in a kind of smile, and his small white teeth — as white as those of a young child — appeared.

“What? What?” asked Catherine.

“Buy the shampoo, and I’ll tell you,” said Salim.

The girl took the bottle of shampoo and asked how much it was.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Salim. “Pay whatever you want.”

Catherine took a hundred-franc note out of her little purse and gave it to Salim. Salim took the note, looked at it for a while, then handed it back to Catherine and turned to me, “No, Brother. I was just joking.”

“Which part was the joke,” I asked him, “the shampoo or the white hair?”

“You guess.”

Salim took the bottle from Catherine, put it back in his leather case, said goodbye, and went off.

Abu Akram then explained that Salim joked around all the time, treating his tragedy as comedy; he is alone in life and needs work.

“What did he study?” I asked him.

“Nothing, my friend,” he said. “We’re all children of the revolution, and what can you study in the revolution?”

“Tell him to come and see me at the hospital. Maybe I can find him some work. But is his story true?”

“Of course, of course,” said Abu Akram. “He’s the only one of his family to have survived.”

“What about his mother?” I asked.

“His mother died, but he insists on saying she picked him up and escaped with him. She didn’t pick him up. They found him under the bodies; they pushed the bodies away and took him to the hospital, and there they discovered that every hair on his head had turned white.”

“And America?”

“What America, Brother? His aunt lives in Detroit, that’s all. Do you think someone like Salim or like us can get a visa for America? Out of the question! He just loves the cinema. He sees Al Pacino’s films dozens of times each and learns the dialogue by heart. He puts the films on the video machine and says the words along with the actors. That’s how he learned English — monkey see, monkey do.”

“And the shampoo?” I asked.

“That’s a different story,” he said. “The shampoo came after the Ekza. Do you know what he was doing for a living last year? He’d go out to al-Fakahani with a bunch of small bottles, stand in the middle of the road and shout, ‘Ekza for pain! Ekza for rheumatism! Ekza for impotence!’ He’d invented a medicine he called Ekza and he’d package it in empty bottles and sell the bottles for three thousand lira each.

“‘Ekza!’ he’d shout, opening a bottle and drinking the contents in front of everyone. ‘Drink and get well! Rub it on where it hurts and the pain will go away!’ And people bought the stuff. Then they arrested him.

“They took him to the police station on the new highway, where he confessed that Ekza was a mixture of water and soya oil, and that it was harmless. The officer smiled and told Salim that he’d overlook it this time on condition that he didn’t do it again. But instead of leaving, Salim took out a bottle and offered it to the officer saying he’d give him a good price and sell him the bottle for two thousand, now he’d become his friend, and that Ekza cured everything, especially constipation.

“The officer lost his temper and ordered him to be beaten and put in jail. They practically beat him to death and left him to rot for more than a month.

“When he returned to the camp, he said they’d released him because they were scared of him and his hair that had turned white overnight.

“After his ordeal in jail, Salim decided not to leave the camp. He stopped making and selling Ekza and started selling shampoo. Yesterday, if you’d seen him, you’d have understood how he works.”